Sherlock, Season Four

Sher-blocked?

I rather like the BBC’s Sherlock. I’ve been watching since 2010, and consider it to be pretty good fun. Not too dry, not too soppy. It’s bonkers, obviously, and occasionally cringe worthy, but fun, nonetheless.

I am a Holmes fan, full stop. I’ve read many, if not all of the short stories, and three of the four novels (though, for some reason, I’ve never quite found the time nor the will to read The Valley of Fear). Brett, to me, is and possibly always will be the definitive Holmes. No one else has ever embodied the character of Holmes so fully and with such charisma. Nonetheless, Sherlock is definitely one of the better ‘modern’ adaptations, and Cumberbatch does his best with what is, occasionally, pretty daft material. Although, I’ve never felt him to be quite as mesmerising as many other people I’ve spoken to.

However…

Ah yes, there is a ‘however’ …

However, from Season Three onwards, I’ve started to suspect that the actors don’t want to be there, and the writers feel constrained by the source material they are working with. How else to explain the fact that the original stories have gradually been receding into the background? And how else to explain the fact that Sherlock has become a tale of one obnoxious sociopaths gradual emotional uncorking, and less and less a detective story about an unusually insightful man solving crimes?

Sherlock has become Bond-light. A sort of Bourse Identity with tea and biscuits. There’s a great deal of running and shouting. Cameras whirl about the place. The cable-drop trope makes a regular appearance. Fast cars swerve and screech. And super-villains plot to take over the world.

Yes, yes, I know, I know, the original stories had action, too: Holmes sometimes resorted to his fists, Watson often carried a revolver, and Holmes possessed a Moroccan leather case, in which he kept a needle and syringe for the occasional, recreational injection of cocaine and other opioids. I know all that, just as I know that Holmes could occasionally be scathing and rude. But Cumberbatch’s Holmes has always seemed obnoxious to a fault. Doyle’s Holmes could be terse when needed (particularly to save someone’s life), and he certainly had little time for women. Moffat’s and Gatiss’s Sherlock is an obnoxious, borderline sociopath. To me, the character is plain unlikable. I would cross the street to avoid him. Wouldn’t you?

Sherlock’s un-likability, and the stories runny-shouty-ness weren’t necessarily problems when the show stuck to telling one of the original stories, albeit in a contemporary way. There was enough there to keep the viewer interested. The stories made sense (more of less), even if they were always very far-fetched. And yes, inSherlock’s defence, some of the original source materials are hardly realistic drama. (The Creeping Man, anybody?). Also, Sherlock has never been a ‘pure’ retelling of the original tales. It’s contemporary, and in that sense, you would expect a certain of amount of nudity, drug taking, and rudeness. (Though, turning Holmes into a law-breaking ‘smack-head’ is definitely a liberty too far, in my opinion). Gatiss and Moffat weave characters and plot elements from multiple sources into one story. Many of those references can be ‘blink and you’ll miss it’. Witness, for example, the various Easter eggs crammed into The Six Thatchers (S4.E1). (There are lines, names and events from, amongst others, The Sign of the Four, A Scandal in Bohemia, The Red-Headed League, and The Adventure of the Yellow Face. Doubtless there are many more, but I had to blink sometimes.) Say what you will about Gatiss and Moffat, but they do know their source material.

Still, their gradual moving away from the original stories, and their focusing upon Holmes as some sort of semi-messianic, comic book hero (on which subject see below), leaves the show feeling a little rudderless, and makes the writers seem as if they wish they were working on some other, flashier project.

As an aside, I’ve always been somewhat irritated by the lazy portrayal of ‘genius’ on television. A genius on TV has to be a superhero. They have to possess supra-human powers, and increasingly, in this day and age, they have to be rude and arrogant. (Witness, Sherlock, Sheldon Cooper and Tony Stark, to name but a few). They’re not just exceptionally clever and very, very hard working (like, say, Goethe, or Mozart, or any other ‘genius’ you care to mention), no, these days they can solve problems that might take a real life genius half their lifetime in the blink of an eye. Their brilliance is effortless. It requires no learning, and no hard graft. It is, in short, total nonsense. This on screen portrayal of genius reached new levels of comic-book daftness in The Final problem (S4E3) when Mycrofft described his sister as ‘“incandescent… an era-defining genius beyond Newton.” Really, Gatiss? Pass me the sick bucket.

But, anyhoo…

Back to the subject in hand. Could it be that the writers have resorted to prolonged car chases, fast-paced action scenes, and dramatic plot twists because they’ve begun to realise that their core their storytelling sometimes makes no sense? I don’t think there’s ever been an episode of Sherlock that hasn’t had at least one or two major or minor plot holes. Sometimes they leap off the screen, and sometimes, however, they’re subtler, and take some time to realise. Nonetheless, they’re there if you bother to look.

Unless, of course, you ask series creator, Moffat, who seems to be quite touchy on the subject. (The lady doth protest too much, methinks?).

When asked about plot holes in the show, Mr Moffat said: “I don’t know what they’re talking about. I thought it [is] watertight. What were they complaining about?

“I think people have come to think a plot hole is something which isn’t explained on screen. A plot hole is actually something that can’t be explained.

“Sometimes you expect the audience to put two and two together for themselves. For Sherlock, and indeed Dr Who, I’ve always made the assumption that the audience is clever.”

Ouch! So there you go. If you spot something that you consider to be a plot-hole, it’s because you’re a bit thick.

Well, I’ve been called worse. But it’s a bit of an extreme reaction, no?

Almost all films and TV shows contain an element of unseen action. We know that. That’s fine. You can’t show everything hat happens over the course of several days, weeks, or even years in an hour or two of screen times. So when people complained in The Final Problem about Holmes and Watson suddenly appearing on top of a fishing boat (as pirates), we can merely assume a degree of off screen action. Fine. I get that. It’s not a whole, it’s just a jump in time. But when you have things that contradict the logic of the universe you have thus far created, or that gainsay established character developments, then those things deserve the title of plot holes, no?

Well, just to be on the safe side, I’ll re-brand them narrative errors, or, at times, merely ‘errors in logic’. And just to be doubly sure, I’ll renew my subscription to the ‘International Society of Thickos’. You know, just in case I’m being a bit dim, as the mighty Moffat claims.

Goodness, where to start! I suppose I could do worse than last night’s The Final problem, if for no other reason than it is still fresh in my mind.

Plot a Course

The Final Problem actually hung together well compared to, say The Six Thatchers.

En Bref: Sherlock and John scare the bejesus out of Mycroft to get him to reveal that there was a third Holmes’ child – a sister. He then spends ten minutes playing Basil Exposition by filling in the parts of their childhoods that Sherlock cannot remember. Mid-conversation a little drone flies in, singing, and detonates a grenade, forcing the three men to leap for the exits (or windows, in the case of John and Sherlock). The three men steal a fishing boat and visit Sherrinford, a maximum-security facility built on an island (a la Alcatraz), and where Eurus Holmes (the aforementioned middle sister) is being housed because she’s, you know ‘era defining’ (uggg), yet psychopathic or, suffering from anti-social personality disorder, in modern language).

Whilst Mycroft and Watson tell-off the governor – after all, the most dangerous woman alive has been popping on and off the worst most secure facility at will – Sherlock goes down to have a bit of a chat with her. Then the plot twists. The governor of the intuition, who has been hypnotised by Eurus and is now under her control, takes Mycroft and Watson prisoner, whilst Eurus captures Holmes.

All three men (plus the governor) wake up in a locked room, after which they are put through a series of locked-room scenarios (sort of like a re-boot of the Crystal Maze if the head-produced were now E. A. Poe), set against the ticking clock of a little girl on a plane that is about to crash into London. In each instance, one of the three must make a moral choice or solve a problem before they are allowed to continue (usually by killing someone). In the end, Sherlock threatens to blow his own brains out, thereby forcing Eurus to end her little experiment early.

In the next scene, they all wake up back at Skyfall Lodge – Sorry, what was I think, Gatiss? – Musgrave, back at Musgrave House, the Holmes’ ancestral home (as in, yes, The Musgrave Ritual. And yes, I love that they worked in lines from the original catechism!). Watson wakes up in a well. Mycroft is nowehere to be seen. And Sherlock, well Sherlock must run around the graveyard, solving a riddle his sister set twenty-odd years ago relating to his supposedly beloved, and lost dog, Redbeard. The Moffat twist comes when Eurus forces Sherlock to remember that Redbeard wasn’t a dog at all, but was in fact a little boy named Victor (I think), forcing us to surmise that Eurus, jealous of her little brother’s friendship, lured Victor to his death in the well, and then tortured Sherlock with a nursery rhyme about the crime until she was taken away by the authories.

Sherlock’s response to this, we learn, was to re-write his memories of childhood, thereby erasing Eurus from his mind, turning a boy into a red setter, and becoming the emotionally withdrawn, egotistical berk we first encounter in season one. Oh, and the little girl on the plane? Well, she was just Eurus’ in her ‘mind palace’, so there was no ticking clock after all.

Got that? Phew!

Well, what’s wrong with that? Nothing really. It’s daft, but it just about hangs together, and it’s certain entertaining. And yet, there are just too many places where the story veers off road and into comic book-mode for it to be wholly enjoyable. And that’s the problem with Sherlock these days: it’s slick, it’s well produced, and occasionally it’s very clever. Yet at the same time, from one scene to the next, it suddenly becomes very infantile, very Batman comic, rather than Holmes detective story.

Take the opening scene, for example. I cannot believe that this confection wasn’t the brain-child of Mr Gatiss, a well known horror fan. Indeed, when you see Stephen King references, piled upon a half-a dozen other horror movie tropes, you can be reasonably assured that he’s behind it. Ok, fine. I’m a horror buff myself. Nothing wrong with that. But it was a dream sequence, surely? It has to have been. Nothing this daft would pass the BBC controllers, would it? A door closes behind Mycroft by itself. Paintings on the wall bleed from their eyes. A clown emerges from out of nowhere.

These things are all well and good in a film set in a universe with supernatural forces at work, but how does Gatiss expect to explain them away within the universe of Sherlock Holmes? Did Watson sneak into Mycroft’s house whilst he was in the shower, poke pinholes in all the paintings and conceal paper-thin, radio-controlled blood packs behind each eye?

Come on, it’s farcical! It’s a classic example of a writer sacrificing audience credulity for the sake of a bit of self-indulgence. And it’s a real pity too, because a little but of thought could have pulled it all together. Suppose, fore example, that Sherlock had stolen a few canisters of that fear and hallucination-inducing toxin cooked up by Project Hound way back in Season One”? Then suppose he’d chucked one into Mycroft’s home cinema? All those hokey costumes and daft horror tropes would have been terrifying to poor Mycroft, even if they’d seemed a bit daft to the viewers. We, the viewers, would have assumed that he was merely hallucinating the bleeding eyes.

But is it a plot hole, or ‘narrative error’? Well, not quite. Yes, we can assume it was all set up off camera by Holmes and Watson, as Moffat would have us believe. But how? How, in the real world, would they achieve such things? They couldn’t and wouldn’t be able to do it. It requires almost supernatural abilities: abilities which, in the universe they have created, do not exist.

Oh well. Moving on.

The grenade.

Grenades have timers. Fair enough. You pull the pin, thrown it away, and a few seconds later, kaboom!

Buy why create a grenade with a motion-trigger than then has a delayed explosion? The clue is in the name – motion trigger. Motion sets it off. There’s not much point in having a proximity mine that waits for you to pass, then counts down a bit before going off, is there? It’s daft. Who would make such a thing? A grenade needs a timer because you have to thrown it a safe distance. A bomb that explores to due motion or proximity, or whatever, needs no such countdown. Obviously, the only reason for this was to give the three men in the room – Mycroft, Watson and Holmes the younger – a chance to leap for the exits. Except, of course, that John and Sherlock threw themselves headfirst out of the windows. A one-story fall, head-first, propelled by the force of an explosive device detonating mere yards behind them, and, in the next scene, nothing, not even a sprain or a bruise.

Hmmm…a slight ‘error in logic’, Moffat?

No, you say?

Just off screen action, then.

Ah, ok. They fell onto the pavement, commando rolled, leapt up and dusted themselves down? Because that’s now how gravity and human reflexes work in this universe? Right-o.

Gotcha.

Moving on.

Why did Eurus try to kill them with a grenade in the first place? When Sherlock later threatens to blow his own head off, she freaks out and calls off phase one of an elaborate scheme that has been five-years in the making. The whole point of her murder spree, we later learn, is to earn a hug from her little brother. She’s trapped in her mind-palace-plane and needs talking down – it’s all a metaphor, don’t ‘cha know – and t can’t happen if Sherlock is dead, so why try to kill him?

I mean, ok, she chose something with a delay to give him a sporting chance. But she can’t know that he will survive. She can’t know that any of them will survive. In which case, all her Moriarty video, all her looked rooms, and all her hostages have been assembled for nothing!

It’s a bit off a plot hole, isn’t it Moffat? Let’s be honest, there’s no ‘unseen action-ing’ your way out of that one.

Anyway, on to Dr Evil’s Island.

Sorry, I mean Sherrinford.

Why did they need to smuggle themselves onto the island? Why not go in the front gate? Mycroft has clearance, surely? To judge by previous episode, he can go wherever he wants, whenever he wants. All we get by way of explanation is: ‘because your security has been breeched’. Ok, but again, why smuggle yourselves in by boat and then go to the trouble of getting captured, just so that Sherlock can sneak off and have a chat with his sister? If security has been breeched and Eurus has been moonlighting in London, then why not arrive with a team of uncorrupted officials and soldiers to secure the facility whilst you interrogate staff and sift through the paper work? I mean it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that a woman who, can by telepathy, magic, hypnosis, or whatever, get people to do doing whatever she wants (because that’s how being clever works), might have done just that to the security personal on the island, even though they were under instruction not to speak with her. It is possible, after all, that it is the governor who has been corrupted, no?

Annnndddd, that’s exactly what happens, but not before super-duper-genius Mycroft fails to factor that possibility into his equations and walks unarmed and unprotected into the midst of this inescapable island.

Anyway, whilst all this is going on, Sherlock, a man with such foresight that he can predict the future weeks in advance (S4.E2) whilst smacked out of his head, a man so observant that he can tell the state of a man’s marriage from a speck of dust on his hat, fails to notice that there isn’t a thick piece of security glass separating himself from his deranged sibling.

The three amigos fall into Eurus’ trap, the governor commits suicide in an effort to save his doomed wife, and Sherlock and co are forced into one horrible decision after another, all prompted along by the plight of a little girl all alone in the clouds on a plane that must be running low on fuel.

Except, that the little girl doesn’t exist.

Sherlock, Mycroft and Watson don’t know that, of course.

But might they have been able to work it out?

Maybe?

I mean, they know Eurus likes to make things up (the bomb in Molly’s flat), and they know she has a voice changer (the security glass stunt). Might they also wonder therefore, how, in her brief stints on the mainland, she has been able to organise the hijacking of a plane bound for London to coincide precisely with the random arrival of her brothers on Dr Evil’s Island? If they took another moment to think, they might also wonder how she had hijacked a plane, knocked out everybody on board, set it to autopilot (with no one on board), and set it on a long auto-descent into the heart of London?

I’m sorry, but it’s phenomenally daft! Alarms bells started going off in my head the moment the little girl was seen to be alone on a plane under Eurus’ control. How had she managed that, I wondered? Wow, the writers must have one hell of an ace up their sleeves to make this one plausible, I thought.

But, of course, the didn’t. It couldn’t possibly have happened, and in any remotely grown-up drama that hadn’t dissolved into a comic book, Sherlock would simply have sat down on the ground, fired the bullet into the TV screen, and told Eurus to sod off.

He didn’t though, because this is comic-book television. Nothing really makes much sense, and all common sense and laws of nature have been put on hold (temporarily, mind you. They come back whenever the writers need them). So instead, Sherlock messes with Molly a bit, threatens to kill himself, and the whole story moves to the Musgrove Estate, which Eurus, the twisted little fire starter, burnt down when she was just a child. After a bit of banter and running about, Sherlock comes to realise that the dog he thought had died when he was a child was in fact his best friend, and Eurus stirs this memory into life by reminding Sherlock that their father is allergic to dogs.

Yup, that’s right … the man who can tell the dimensions of your kitchen by the sun-bleaching on a piece of paper, spent thirty-odd years unable to deduce that his father being allergic to dogs might have meant that the family never owned a dog.

Whatever.

I mean, plot-wise, the dots join up, but the who thing is so farcically unbelievable and so out of character that you don’t really care any more.

Still, you hope for an explaition. I mean, they have got one, right?

Yup, and it’s a doosey!

It seems that somewhere inside Sherlock’s infallible ‘mind palace’ – you know, where he stores everything meticulously using an eidetic memory – a whole bunch of data has become corrupted. Sherlock has rewritten his childhood (because smart people think like computers, don’t you know). He has supressed the memories of his sister’s cruelty. Mycroft has helpfully kept these memories dormant by providing Sherlock with little ‘prompts’ through out the show, references to Red Beard, that sort of thing. Hey ho, the whole thing has to have been foreshadowed somehow, so fair enough. If I were being picky, however, I might ask why Mycroft elects not to share the Red Beard revelation with Sherlock right from the beginning? Sending him in to battle wits with the twenty-first centuries finest mind, whilst still blissfully unaware of some painful truth with which she used to torture him, seems more than a little negligent by big-brother dearest. Why didn’t he tell Sherlock back in Baker Street when he was scaring them all with stories of what a little psycho she is:

“Oh yes, and by the way, did you ever wonder what happened to Red Beard?”

“My dog?”

“No, Sherlock, the pirate”.

*Cue big Cumber-frown.*

“Didn’t it ever seem odd to you, bother dearest, that our father, a man who would convulse at the mere presence of a pocket poodle, would keep a giant red setter in the house…?”

* Thrown in some patented Cumberbatch, quizzical eyebrow acting.*

You get the idea.

Poor Sherlock. Negligent Mycroft. Forewarned would have been forearmed, after all.

But no, that would spoil the ending, so he has to find out the dramatic way.

Fair enough. This is TV after all.

But it’s not very, hmmm, clever of Mycroft, is it? I mean, in order to get the plot moving, ‘brilliant’, forsighted geniuses have to behave in ways that short-sighted and dim.

Then we get the bit with the canticle, which, in the original story, beings:

‘Whose was it?”

‘His who is gone’

‘What shall have it?’

‘He who will come’.

In this re-telling, Mofatt and Gatiss have worked it into a riddle, concocted by Eurus when she was about five years old, firstly to torture Sherlock as to the wareabouts of his lost dog (or, friend), but also to tell him in 2016 that she is sitting up stairs in his old bedroom waiting for a hug. It’s a solution that is at once both inventive, but also maddeningly frustrating and unsatisfying. Where you were hoping for something clever, you are left with a thin cop-out that defies belief.

Meanwhile, poor old John is still stuck down a well, and now it begins to flood with water from above. Yup, this is a well with a tap at the . Whereas others dig wells to acces underground streams to bring water to the surface, the Holmes family use them to dump unwanted water in the ground. At casa Holmes, they have taps at the top, just in case you feel like, literally, pouring water down the drown. Though, to be fair to Moffat, it might not be a tap. We never get to see the source of the water that is pouring down upon poor John, so it could very well be a hose pipe with a very long extension. A hose pipe that Eurus is presumably controlling via remote from the bedroom. (Unless, of course, she’s re-plumbed the house so that the garden tap is in her bedroom? She is ‘beyond Newton’ after all, and he would never have thought of that).

Anyhoo…John gets rescued from the well, Eurus goes back to Sherrinford, and then we are treated to a nice ‘everything-is back-to-normal-montage’, which should have ended once scene earlier than it did. Baker Street is rebuilt. All is well. Cut.

Done.

Show’s over.

But no, we have to have Mary in other of here, ‘I’m dead, but the writers want to keep using me DVD sequences’. Then she calls them her Baker Street boys, and as if that isn’t enough, the two come charging out of ‘Rathbone Place’ in a scene that immediately reminded me of Del Boy and Rodney dressed up as Batman and Robin. It was awful. Just awful. I almost physically recoiled from the television.

Oh, those Baker Street Boys!

And that about covers it.

Oh, except of course that Moriarty was back (and he’s, well, ‘gay now’, as Willow once put it).

Except, not really. He’s still dead. He was just tacked on so that the writers could hint for years (yup, literally years at this point) that he was alive again, when in fact he was dead all along. He was just there to troll Sherlock in the midst of his Sophie’s Choice between Mycroft and Watson. He served no plot purpose at all. Not even slightly. You could have cut him out completely and it wouldn’t have made the slightest bit of difference.

Well, that’s one episode covered. And, whilst it felt good to get off my chest, I do feel a bit bad for bashing the show so relentlessly. I mean, I really enjoy Sherlock. I know it makes no sense, and I know it places hard and fast with reality and the laws of physics as and when it sees fit, but I enjoy it all the same.

To judge by online reactions, people seem to have split into two camps following this last season. Either it was utter genius. A complete tour-de-force. Dazzling. Mind-blowing. And oh, so-clever. Or, it was utter shite. Total garbage. Self-indulgent twaddle.

Personally, I dislike this polarisation of opinion that we all seem to have to have these days. Why can’t it have been pretty good, but flawed, a bit daft in places, but over all, pretty good fun? Why does everything have to be black or white? And why do people have to get so angry with anyone who has a different opinion?

I don’t know. It’s sad.

For me anyway, season four of Sherlock has been at times brilliant, but at others mindless. The production has been spectacular, but also occasionally clichéd and over-the-top. The acting has been very good – except for the few occasions when some of the principals phoned it in. (I’m look at you, Freeman – if you don’t want to do the show anymore, then don’t!). It’s been a lot of fun, but it’s been very frustrating, too.

I hope they do more. And I hope that if they do, they get back to telling detective stories and leave the whole ‘Sherlock’s emotional awakening’ arc in the past.